You Say You Want a Revolution?

Proponents of socialism like to fancy themselves as revolutionaries. Nothing could be further from the truth.

“Zohran for Mayor” poster in the East Village | Wikimedia Commons

by Bretigne Shaffer via The Advocates for Self-Government

Of all of the claims made by proponents of socialism, one of the most outlandish is that there is anything “revolutionary” about that ideology. For thousands of years, human history has been dominated by stories of conquest and domination. Even by 2025, societies that show a high regard for individual liberty and protection for property rights are the exception and not the rule. Socialism is simply one more flavor of the brutal authoritarianism that has been the norm for most of our time on earth.

What Socialists Say They Want… And What That Means

Proponents of socialism will tell you that they dream of an egalitarian society, and that getting there will require a massive redistribution of wealth. What they leave out are the ugly bits:

How is this egalitarianism to be enforced? Who is to do the redistributing? What happens to someone who doesn’t want their wealth “redistributed”? What if somebody wants more than their neighbor has and is willing to work for it? And what if someone else is willing to hire them to work? Who is going to step in and prevent this exchange between consenting adults? And more importantly, how?

Whether they intend it or not, whether they recognize it or not, the things socialists desire can only be brought about by a powerful authoritarian state.

It is no accident of history that the socialist experiments of the 20th century ended in brutal tyranny and mass starvation. Both are inherent in an ideology of enforced egalitarianism, and both were entirely predictable. (In fact, the failure of socialism was predicted by economists Ludwig von Mises and Friedrich Hayek in the 1920s.)

Socialists Badly Misunderstand “Wealth” And Economic Activity

To call for “redistribution of wealth” is to misunderstand what an economy is. An economy is not a static, unchanging quantity of resources to be divided in some manner among the people who participate in it. An economy is a living, changing, growing organism. It is not a pie to be sliced up and distributed. It is more like a bakery that makes pies.

When you give someone the authority to take those pies from the people who made them and “distribute” them to others as they see fit, you not only violate the property rights of the bakers, you also take away their incentive to produce more pies. Production stops and people starve. This is precisely what happened in the Soviet Union, China, and other countries where people were not allowed to profit from what they produced.

Proponents of socialism will tell you that profit is evil, that the profit motive is at the root of everything wrong in our society, and that when one person gains through profit, it is because someone else has lost. That one person’s profit is always at another’s expense.

Nothing could be further from the truth. It is worth spending a little time to understand this, and the function of profits in the marketplace, because this particular misunderstanding has led to so much poverty and misery in the world.

Voluntary exchanges are mutually beneficial. People only engage in exchanges if they believe they will benefit from them. Thus, when one person profits, it is not at another person’s expense, but because they have provided something that the other person wanted.

The only time this is not true is when someone is coerced into an exchange. This happens all the time (think taxes, eminent domain, highway robbery, etc.), but it is not the profits that cause the deficit—it is the coercion. It is only in a world characterized by coercive relationships that one person benefits at another’s expense.

This may seem like an odd thing to say if you are still thinking that an economy is a pie. It’s not a pie. Stop thinking that it’s a pie.

It is a bakery that makes pies. There is not some static quantity of pies out there waiting to be distributed. There’s a whole system with lots and lots of moving pieces that all come together to make the pies that people want. And if it turns out that people don’t want pies, the system makes something else.

So the question is: How do the people working in this system know what to make? The answer is that they get signals from the marketplace indicating what goods and services people value relative to other goods and services. And what are those signals? Two of the most critical are profits and losses.

In a world of free people making voluntary exchanges, profits are the means by which producers determine what people want, and therefore what they should make if they want to be successful. If a particular good or service is extremely profitable, it likely means that a lot of people want it very much.

When other producers see those high profits, some of them will stop producing what they have been making and switch to producing the high-profit item. As more and more producers enter the market and compete with each other, more of the item that people wanted so badly gets made, and the price (as well as the profits) comes down.

Again, this is a system—a living organism made up of countless individual players all connected through a network of signals: prices, profits, losses. Take away the signals and you destroy the organism’s ability to function. Treat an economy as if it is just a bundle of goodies to be divvied up, and you kill the organism that makes those goodies.

What About A Real Revolution?

In fact, we already have forced redistribution of wealth. Through taxation and, even more so, through central banking and fiat money, real wealth is distributed from productive people into the hands of government elites and their corporate cronies. If you don’t know what I’m talking about, see here and here. What socialists propose is just another form of what’s already happening, but with different beneficiaries.

Do they really imagine that it will turn out any differently? Do they imagine that it will not result in an entrenched group of powerful elites benefiting at the expense of everyone else? One does not have to look any further than the past century to see that an inevitable consequence of enforced equality is always a very, very privileged elite. Every single time.

Why? Because someone needs to be in a position to enforce all this equality. And therefore, someone needs to have a great deal of power over everyone else. Those who wield this power will be in a position to abuse it—and if history is any guide, they will abuse it to a lavish (for themselves) and horrific (for everyone else) degree.

If we want real change, then the best place to start is to question the institution of the state itself. Start by questioning the idea that it’s acceptable to use force to get other people to do what you want them to. Start by questioning the idea that a peaceful, civilized society can ever be built on a foundation of coercion and violence.

There are many people who are already doing this. Real revolutionaries, with solid ideas that they’ve articulated pretty well: My dad was one. His books Calculated Chaos and Boundaries of Order address this issue directly. The Mises Institute does a fantastic job of publishing and educating on the topic of markets and the state. There is an entire body of very solid work on how stateless societies can and do function.

These critics of statism argue not for the redistribution of material wealth, but for the redistribution of authority—from centralized, top-down hierarchies of people ruling over others to individuals having authority over their own lives. They advocate peaceful, non-violent revolution in the most radical form imaginable: Simply rejecting the coercive institution that is the monopoly state.

Those who advocate for socialism are correct in observing that our current, interventionist system serves an elite few at the expense of everyone else, and that our governments are working on behalf of the large corporations that prop them up. Where they go wrong is in believing that a more authoritarian system will make things better.

And make no mistake—what they are calling for is more authoritarianism. By necessity, socialism requires a more centralized state, with a small elite wielding even more power over the rest of us than they do today.

There is nothing revolutionary about that. It is what dictators and rulers have always sought to do. And when they have succeeded, it has been with tragic consequences for the people living under them.

Those who say they want a revolution would do well to look beyond the proposition that free people, engaged in free exchange, are the source of our problems. They would do well to take their focus off of capitalism and put it instead on the institution of the state itself: The toxic idea that one group of people has the right to rule over others.

If you want a real revolution, don’t urge people to seek solutions from the state—urge them to abandon it altogether.

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